Turkey

Anatolia is one of the cradles of civilisation — Göbekli Tepe, near Şanlıurfa, is the oldest known monumental temple complex, from around 9600 BC — and later home to the Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, and the Greek cities of the Aegean coast. It became the wealthy heartland of the Roman and then Byzantine empire, whose capital, Constantinople, stood for over a thousand years.

Turkic peoples moved in from Central Asia from the eleventh century, and the Ottoman dynasty, rising in northwest Anatolia around 1300, took Constantinople in 1453 and built an empire that at its height ran from Hungary to Yemen and Algeria. Its long decline through the nineteenth century ended with defeat in the First World War, the occupation of Istanbul, and a war of independence led by Mustafa Kemal, later Atatürk, who abolished the sultanate and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

Atatürk's reforms were sweeping: a secular state, a Latin alphabet, legal and dress codes modelled on Europe, and votes for women. The later republic saw multi-party democracy interrupted by military coups (1960, 1971, 1980) and a long armed conflict with the Kurdish separatist PKK from 1984. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AK Party have governed since 2003, first as prime minister and, after a 2017 referendum, under an executive presidency. His tenure has brought infrastructure and early economic growth, but also a failed coup attempt in 2016, mass purges and jailings, media restrictions, a currency crisis, and Turkey's adoption of the name Türkiye at the UN in 2022.

Turkey is about 99 per cent Muslim, mostly Sunni with a large Alevi minority, but the state is constitutionally secular, and the balance between religious and secular life — headscarves in public institutions, alcohol regulation, the status of religious schools — is a running political fault line, felt differently in cosmopolitan Istanbul, the conservative central "Anatolian tiger" cities, the Alevi and Kurdish southeast, and the Aegean coast.

Hospitality is deeply ingrained: guests are offered tea (çay) endlessly, and refusing food or drink can seem rude. Family ties are strong, respect for elders is shown in greetings and seating, and Ramadan and the two Eids reshape the calendar. Football is a national obsession, with the big Istanbul clubs at its centre.

Turkish coffee, with its fortune-telling ritual, and the hamam (bathhouse) are both on UNESCO's cultural heritage lists, and craft traditions — carpets and kilims, ceramics from İznik and Kütahya, marbled paper (ebru), copperwork — remain alive.

Around 85 million people live in Turkey, more than a fifth of them in greater Istanbul, with Ankara, İzmir, Bursa, and Antalya the other large cities. The population is young by European standards but the birth rate is falling. The country also hosts one of the world's largest refugee populations, around three to four million people, most of them Syrians who arrived after 2011.

The economy is large and diversified — cars, appliances, textiles, steel, construction, agriculture, and a huge tourism sector — but has been strained for years by very high inflation, a weak lira, and unorthodox monetary policy, which has eroded savings and living standards. The 2023 earthquakes devastated eleven provinces and displaced millions.

Daily life mixes the modern and the traditional: shopping malls and metro lines alongside weekly street markets, the call to prayer over café terraces, and extended families gathering for long weekend meals.

Turkish cuisine is one of the world's great regional traditions, built on lamb and beef, wheat and rice, yoghurt, aubergine, and abundant fresh vegetables and herbs. The meal often opens with meze — small cold and hot dishes, from haydari and ezme to stuffed vine leaves and fried liver — followed by grilled meats: the many kinds of kebap (Adana, Urfa, İskender, şiş), köfte meatballs, and pide and lahmacun, the Turkish flatbreads.

Regional specialities run deep: the olive-oil vegetable dishes and seafood of the Aegean, the fiery food and pistachio baklava of Gaziantep, the anchovy dishes of the Black Sea, the çiğ köfte of the southeast, and the mantı (tiny meat dumplings in garlic yoghurt) of the centre. Breakfast (kahvaltı) is a spread of cheeses, olives, eggs, jams, bread, and tea.

Baklava, künefe, milk puddings, and Turkish delight (lokum) are the sweets; çay is drunk all day from tulip glasses; and rakı, the aniseed spirit, is the traditional accompaniment to a long fish-and-meze dinner.

Istanbul straddles two continents on the Bosphorus, with the Hagia Sophia (a church, then a mosque, a museum, and since 2020 a mosque again), the Blue Mosque, Topkapı Palace, the Basilica Cistern, the Grand and Spice Bazaars, and a skyline of domes and minarets best seen from a ferry.

The Aegean and Mediterranean coasts hold the classical sites — Ephesus, Pergamon, Aphrodisias, Troy, and the ruins along the Lycian Way, which runs past Ölüdeniz and the sunken city at Kekova. Pamukkale's white travertine terraces sit below the Roman spa city of Hierapolis, and inland Cappadocia has its cave churches, underground cities, and balloon-filled dawn skies.

Further east are Mount Nemrut with its giant stone heads, the medieval Armenian capital of Ani on the border, the lake and island churches around Van, and the biblical landscape below Mount Ararat. Ankara has Atatürk's mausoleum and a strong archaeological museum, and the Gallipoli peninsula on the Dardanelles is a place of pilgrimage for Turks, Australians, and New Zealanders alike.